Linux

I've been dual booting Windows and Linux since the 00s. At some point around 2015-2016 I just stopped installing and maintaining Windows altogether and now I have a virtual machine image I just transfer around my network if I ever have to use Windows for something.

I think the real turning point for me was when they introduced UAC and ever-increasing restrictions on unsigned drivers starting with Vista. Wine was already a thing and I could run most games I cared about even back then although I still had to boot into Windows for gaming sometimes. Once steam Proton starting getting really good which was around 2015, there just wasn't a reason to be using Windows anymore. As the enshittification of Windows continued getting worse it became more tedious and time consuming to get anything done in Windows to the point you might as well use Gentoo. I do programming and game modding for fun and there's no way I could use modern Windows for this it's so bad and slows everything down with it's utter bullshit.

I decided to switch when windows xp went end-of-life, because my pc was a mid-2000's era relic that would surely catch fire if it was forced to handle the windows 7/10 bloat. Naturally, I installed Mint on bare metal without doing any research beforehand. Not the best idea, but sometimes it's fun to jump headfirst into a completely foreign landscape. That said, Cinnamon (the desktop environment of Mint) shares much of its design language with windows, so it's not really that foreign, as far as the graphical interface is concerned.

What surprised me was just how different the underlying system was, how much more transparent and accessible it was, and how incredibly efficient and versatile the command line could be. Then there's the broader OSS community, which I think is a fantastic thing to participate in even if you don't use Linux, but using Linux is certainly a gateway.

I'm not saying Linux is perfect, and it's probably not for everyone, but it is nice to not be held captive by some monopolistic corporation, who continuously engages in ethically questionable anti-consumer behaviour, in the name of increasingly monetizing their user base. Linux gives power back to the end users, and that's what makes it worthwhile and important.

Long time ago my dad bought a few netbooks and they came with Xandros pre-installed. It wasn't much of a choice to be honest (all my friends, school, every other PC was running Windows). And I never give it a chance because there was a desktop with Windows so I used that instead.

Times goes buy and the Xandros version was not going to keep up with my needs and I've switched to Ubuntu Remix (very cool at the time) and then I've got to experience Ubuntu 09.10 with Gnome. And that was a game changer for me (I learned a lot on how Linux works under the.hood) but I kept Windows machine just for gaming (until last year).

My intro to Linux was Google. Their chromebooks allow you to install Linux and I've played around w/ Debian. I never took it serious in terms of a viable alternative to Windows, but it was a great way to supplement the barebones ChromeOS over the last 4-5 years.

My desktop was from yesteryear (i7-2600) but could still get most jobs done outside of heavy gaming/local LLM, but I was not going to be able to upgrade to 11 which sucked since the desktop seemed perfectly functional. My plan was to ride out the Windows long-term support until 2028 and then buy a dirt cheap refurb desktop then.

On a separate track, about 3 months ago, I started my foray into front-end alternatives. I canceled YouTube Premium and started using Piped via redirector (redirects webpages to websites of your choosing) and then I found out about libredirect, which does a lot of the heavy lifting for you, and across multiple popular services including twitter, reddit, imgur, etc.

Initially I occasionally used the reddit/twitter alternatives, but as they became clearer bad actors, it became my defacto options. This nudged me to kbin and privacy-focused subreddits where Linux was not the red-headed stepchild.

The hype/reviews around Debian 12 made me curious to try the full desktop environment, so I decided to dual boot my desktop. I bricked it, bought a new W11-capable desktop and dual boot that with Debian 12.

Now, Linux my daily driver, and only use Windows 11 for workflows that are not optimized for Linux yet. The most surprising thing is the level of customization on things that I never thought about before. It can be overwhelming initially, but I'm finding the sweet spot over time.

I’m late to the party but windows Vista forced me off of windows. Not 5 minutes into setting up a new laptop and it told me even after clicking yes for admin privileges that I didn’t have the right to uninstall mcafee… I threw Debian on the laptop and never looked back. Ended up running FreeBSD for years on that thing and have mostly stuck with them since.

For Linux as others have stated lack of crashes and clear ways to customize/fix things was incredible.

FreeBSD doesn’t support all the newer standards yet (looking at you wifi6), but it is beyond rock stable. A month plus of 24/7 uptime between reboots for years and it’s just as snappy as when I first installed it. And even better they push hard to keep things more or less the same. The things I learned setting up FreeBSD 8.0 are still the same for FreeBSD 13. The biggest changes have been upgraded hardware support and quality of life tools that interact with the systems I was already using.

As a note FreeBSD does not come with a graphical interface. They have imo the best manual (handbook) for setting it up and getting going, and have native zfs for software raid arrays.

My risky two cents here is FreeBSD is great for learning all the ins and outs of Unix-like systems but is missing some things linux users take for granted like docker for servers (they use jails you set up yourself) and no cuda libraries for ai. If you have the time and want to learn how these systems operate from the ground up I find it’s better than arch. Easier to install, no compiling everything like gentoo, and an incredibly clean manual that has always made sense and worked exactly as expected. For just getting a desktop and easing into things there’s also nothing wrong with say Linux mint or any of the other recommendations others have said either.

The glory of Unix-like systems is they’re yours, and once you get used to how they run they’ll be rock steady for years and run faster than windows on the same device.

Download a linux distro iso file

Burn iso to usb using rufus

Restart computer with usb plugged in

Get into bios by pressing your system's specified key to get into bios while booting

Go to the boot settings

Select your usb

Linux should pop up after a minute with install menu

If you configure the settings right, you can have a dual boot setup with both windows and linux

After linux is installed you no longer need the usb

The easiest way to try linux is to install it from the Microsoft App Store — not joking, windows officially supports running Linux now. Here’s a random tutorial: https://adamtheautomator.com/windows-subsystem-for-linux/

Because it was mandated by our communist party!